Want more traffic? Publicize now makes it easy

February 4, 2011

Scott Berkun

We’ve made some big user experience improvements to how the traffic building feature called Publicize works. This feature allows you to connect your WordPress.com blog to your account on social networking services like Twitter and Facebook, broadcasting your posts to your friends automatically for you.

In the past it took a few steps to figure out how to get going. Now it’s just a click away.

Starting today, when you publish a post, you’ll see a mention of the Publicize feature.

If you click Turn on the publicize feature, it will take you to the Sharing Settings page in your Dashboard. Here you can configure any of the Publicize services you like.

Pick one or more of the services you want to turn on. It’s required that you already have an account with each service you want to use, as you’ll be sent to the service and asked to log in to connect your WordPress.com blog.

Then, as seen above on the Edit Post page, WordPress.com will let you choose which services you want to send your post to. You can also customize the message you send along with the URL.

It’s now easier than ever to grow traffic to your blog. If you have more questions, you can read more about how Publicize works here. Happy publicizing!

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This is a great feature! I enjoy using it to share my posts on Facebook and Twitter to let fellow homemakers and aspiring bakers know about my latest adventures and the advice I pick up along with it in my blogs! The more integrated the social networking worlds and the blogging worlds become the greater the audience the words we post will reach! Good work WordPress 🙂

I absolutely love this but didn’t realize I could customize my message for Twitter! Going to enable the Twitter function again and makes it so easy now to let people know I’ve posted. 🙂 Thanks WordPress!

i love the customizable message part – this is a great idea!
Since we’re in the spirit of sharing, does the customization of the message also include the small share buttons at the bottom of each post. ie when someone would like to tweet my post after reading it, will it offer the already customizable message?
thanks in advance guys for all your great work

Convenient! Just to confirm, does this mean that, for example, if you choose to publicize a post on facebook, a message would be sent to each of your friends (which wouldn’t necessarily be ideal!), or would it just be publicized with a status update? Thanks!

I’ve used this, though it is not clear that a Twitter link will be generated after the message. Anyway, the Twitter one works – I’m considering spamming my friends on Facebook, though I hate publicizing my own stuff.

I really appreciate any help you can give us to get more traffic to our sites. After all, that is what blogging is all about. The “how Publicize works here” link is good because it is in depth for each service we can connect our blog to, giving us the confidence to take our blogs to the next level.

With regards to Facebook, is it possible to post to my fan page I have setup for my business rather than my personal Facebook page? Some applications I’m using give the option during the approval process, but I didn’t see that when I just tried the new publicize feature.

Re publicizing on Facebook – I have a personal account there and also a page for my business. One of my blogs is tied to my business activities and I’d like to publicise new blog entries on the business page, not my personal account. Facebook has an intricate process for doing this, which results in posts being imported as notes, usually two or three days after I publish the post! I’d prefer to just publicize the URL and have this happen in a timely way. Not sure if there is anything wordpress.com can do to facilitate this, except perhaps to nudge Facebook to allow pages to have their own identity for interaction with other social networks.

well glad it’s easier. but I already do all thay to publicize. I’ve done all the blog setup routines for yahoo and google. I use keywords. i manually tweet updates and thank users for their comment via FB and Twitter. I do a variety of writing, humor, pix, and polls.

I love this feature and have used it forever; I believe since WordPress first offered it… It totally Rocks!
Silly me, I had assumed everyone used the feature. Must add this to my post on PostADay lessons and update.
Have a great weekend all! 🙂
ElizMirth and Motivation

Maybe I’m missing something, but haven’t I been able to do this for quite a while now? I set all my posts to automatically connect to facebook and twitter several months ago. How is this different than what I’ve already been doing?

ever since i have Windows Live Writer, i always use it to compose/publish new posts.. it’s much more convenient than go to WP.. few months ago i activate Facebook and Twitter connect on WP, and since then, every time i publish a post via WLW, it’s automatically posted to my Facebook and Twitter account. Not that I have many readers or wish to have more.. I just love it! ha ha ha..

I’ve been using this feature for some months. Previously I had a different way of uploading to Facebook from WordPress. Since I activated Publicize all my posts appear twice on my Facebook page which is annoying. Has anyone else had this experience? Has anyone managed to overcome it?